Vote “NO”
next November on this self-serving Teachers’ Union Initiative or you may
soon be subsidizing a Guaranteed Annual Salary for every profession and
trade in Idaho.

Boise, ID – Earmarking
1% of the Idaho sales tax for public education is an insane economic
action. What if, for example, the cities of Boise and Meridian become
predominantly a Baby Boomer retirement community by 2010 with essentially no
school-age children? The retired Baby Boomers will spend tons of their
excess wealth on consumable items, thus bringing in sales tax revenue
totally out of proportion for the non-existent children in an empty Boise
School District. The Idaho Education Association (IEA), a powerful lobbyist
group for Idaho teachers, will be flush with surplus sales tax money – in
addition to its already over-bloated public education budget from property
taxes. Will the IEA, the Teacher’s Union, and pub ed bureaucrats spend the
surplus sales tax money? You bet your sweet derriere they will.

It is a gross
mistake – at an economic and political level – to dedicate a percentage of
the Idaho sales tax to any specific government expenditure. From an
economics point of view, it is counter productive for the state to give
money to the producers, rather than the consumers, of education. And
politically, it would set a bad precedent for all other groups, private and
public, and encourage them to clamor for their “fair share” of robbing the
public for a guaranteed future income. (What? Did the IEA Teachers’ Union
just get back from a seminar in Paris where they took lessons from the
socialist French workers who rioted in the streets last month until French
President Jacques Chirac caved in to their demands for Guaranteed Government
Job Protection Forever?)

Basic free market
economics dictates that all project budgets should be determined from a
bottoms-up calculation of real anticipated costs, not from a tops-down
showering of a glob of tax money into the hands of spend-happy bureaucrats
or special interest groups. As stated above, in addition to using a
bottoms-up calculation vs. a tops-down method, public education tax money
should be attached to the consumer, not the producer, of education.

Even in socialist
Europe, the state issues education vouchers to the students and their
parents, the consumers, to choose which school, public or private (including
parochial since the money belongs to the parents, not the government, and
thus is not a mixing of church and state) to spend their vouchers. While
this is not a complete free market, it does create competition among the
education producers, including the public education system, and produces a
more quality education than in the United States.

Consumer-side
control of spending is also a good check against over-spending by pork
barrel governments. Imagine this: if
sales tax money was routed to a State Public Car Manufacturer (the producer)
instead of remaining in the hands of car consumers, we would produce botched
up cars that didn’t run and it would cost over $1 million per automobile.
Welcome to America’s public education system. – FM Duck